Early in horror game Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, the character you play, Aidan, and his partner Sunny, are pushing the bounds of the sex they enjoy together. Already into BDSM, they discover a puzzle box that, when solved, will allow them to explore a new extreme of their fetish play. However, when they unlock the box it summons a set of torture demons called Cenobites and Sunny is torn to fleshy pieces and sent to hell. From that violent beginning, Aidan bargains with one of the demons of torture to find a way to bring Sunny back fo life and made whole.
Not your average walk in the park – or, if it is, I am deeply sorry for you. My park is great. There is a duck pond – but a good starting point for a horror game vased on Clive Barker's horror series.
Still, when I spoke to Hellraiser: Revival's developers I wanted to know if Sunny was being punished for enjoying her fetish.
There's a trope in horror, particularly of slasher movies in the 70s, that characters who have sex die. Whether a conscious decision by the creators or not, killing characters off immediately after they have casual, unmarried, or untraditional sex can suggest they are being punished for a transgression. While life is messy, plots in stories are often neater, constructed as simple cause and effect. Sunny explores her sexuality, then she dies. So what is the reason behind it?
"She did not die as a punishment," game director Emil Esov tells me. "There's method to what Cenobites offer and what they do [and] she sort of willingly did it."
"They're fucking around and finding out," narrative director Antony de Fault adds, "But their finding out isn't a value judgement on our part where we're trying to say 'They did this bad thing'. It's not puritanical where this character is into BDSM and so therefore must die." Instead, he explains, Sunny's death and interest in BDSM are expressions of an impulse that she and Aidan share: "They simply pursue their own annihilation because that's the type of people they are."
"Sunny and Aiden both come from this place of seeking something more to fill their inner voids, Esov says. "They have a troubled relationship. Their sex play is probably the result of their past behaviours and past lives and then they found each other – a kindred spirits type of thing – and inevitably when two people with voids they are desperate to fill… it spirals."
"Hellraiser is very important to a lot of people," de Fault elaborates. "It expresses something essentially true about the neediness that we all experience deep down, the desire for more, the desire for greater experiences, or to explore. It's the same reason that people have midlife crises."
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